Tag: Afghanistan War

I.F. Stone’s sign-off, that medic’s song, and my letter all are documents from a time when Americans could be in opposition to, while also feeling in service to, their country. They are documents from a lost world and so would, I suspect, have little meaning to the young of the present moment.

On Sept. 29 Ashraf Ghani was sworn in as president of Afghanistan. What he had to say in his inaugural speech about his wife, Rula Ghani, sent his nation’s progressive women over the moon. (At right, an Afghan.)

For the past three years, members of Veterans For Peace and their allies have gathered at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Lower Manhattan on the date of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to mark another year of a war and call for peace. This year, they were finally able to do so without facing a small army of police threatening arrest.

As the wars overseas draw to something like a close, it’s not just battered GIs that come home. “The former tools of combat—M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers and more—are ending up in local police departments, often with little public notice,” Matt Apuzzo writes at The New York Times.

Thanks to deep-sea fish, the ocean absorbs about half of the carbon humans produce; Las Vegas’ main water supply is a lake that just hit record-low levels; meanwhile, Bowe Bergdahl would not be alone in the “honorable history of war deserters.” These discoveries and more after the jump.

The surprise announcement by President Obama on Saturday of the negotiated release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, captured in 2009, is wonderful news for him, his family and America. But what does it tell us about the Taliban, Afghanistan and Pakistan?

The Vietnam veteran and Boston University professor of history and international relations is the author of a new book: “Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country.” He joined “Democracy Now!” on Monday to talk about the growing gulf between soldiers and the society that sends them to war.

When the U.S. initially invaded Afghanistan, the terms “women’s rights” and “protection” were thrown around as justification for war. More than a decade later, it’s clear little has been done to promote women’s rights in Afghanistan, and the conditions created by military intervention have only worsened the prospects for equality.

Drone strikes cause 10 times the number of civilian casualties that manned aircraft attacks do, a U.S. military study found, contradicting claims that robotic planes are more precise than their human operated counterparts.

It didn’t take much. No battles. No dead bodies. I spent just three and a half weeks as a contractor in Iraq, when the war there was at its height, rarely leaving the security of American military bases.

Now that history has shown us how monumentally terrible the idea of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq turned out to be, the president who lied to get us into the quagmire says he’s “comfortable” with what he did.

Washington has vociferously denounced Afghan corruption as a major obstacle to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. But none of the relevant documents refer to the single most relevant fact: that the fraud and misconduct originates in Washington itself.

Once again, the erratic president of Afghanistan had U.S. officials shaking their heads in disbelief after he gave a speech in which he blamed the interactions of the U.S. and the Taliban for his country’s security problems.

“If you look at the context of what he’s done and the enormous damage he did to national security and our prestige around the world, throughout most of history someone like that would be executed,” former Defense Department spokesman J.D. Gordon said of Pfc. Bradley Manning on Al-Jazeera this week.

In declaring that Pfc. Bradley Manning “broke the law” in allegedly handing classified military records to the international whistle-blowing group WikiLeaks, President Obama and Manning’s critics have unlawfully told the courts to find Manning guilty, a writer on the accused’s support team says.

After more than a decade of fighting in Afghanistan, the U.S. death toll in Operation Enduring Freedom has reached 2,000. Marine Cpl. Taylor J. Baune, 21, from Andover, Minn., had married just three months before shipping out.

Two men involved in the NATO summit protests in Chicago are being held on separate terrorism charges. One is accused of making a false threat about blowing up a highway overpass. The other is charged with discussing the making of a pipe bomb.

On Sunday, veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars led thousands of people in a march on the NATO summit in Chicago, at the end of which 50 former soldiers renounced the wars by throwing their military service medals toward the building where leaders were gathered.

After a trip to Afghanistan cloaked in secrecy, President Barack Obama on Tuesday signed a “strategic partnership agreement” with Hamid Karzai that promises continuing U.S. support for the Afghan president’s nation.

Sarah Palin’s strict views have turned her into a grandma for the second time; al-Qaida takes a page out of Disney’s book to recruit children; meanwhile, Facebook fights Google+ by adding news to its online community. These discoveries and more after the jump.

Truthdig contributor Chris Hedges teamed up with Laila Al-Arian for The Nation’s shocking report “The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness,” in which American vets describe, in graphic detail that will challenge even the least fainthearted readers, “the disparity between the reality of the war and how it is portrayed by the US government and American media.”

The American Civil Liberties Union obtained 500 claims for compensation filed by civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. The claim descriptions paint a picture of the confusion, chaos, and the seeming randomness of violence which has shaped life and death in Iraq and Afghanistan during the last four years.